The first thing you should know about me is that I'm not like other males. When they came for my mother, I did not cry. Not when the Society made a circus of her, televising the arrest. Not when the Golds tried him under their joke of a justice. My father hit me for that. My sister Kiera was supposed to be the woman of the house, the stoic one. I was supposed to cry. Instead she bawled like a little boy when Dawn tucked a neckce on her work boots and went back to her family's side. I just watched and wished she had died fighting instead of dancing.

  On Mars there is not much gravity. So you have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.

  I can smell my own stink inside the frysuit I stole. The suit is made out of nanopstic, whatever that is, and is hot. It insutes me completely. Dawn is on the driver's seat ahead of me, expertly driving. I’m alone with her in this deep tunnel on a machine built like a titanic metal hand, one that grasps and gnaws at the ground.

  This is the 10th time Dawn has snuck me with her while she drills. She is a helldiver. To be one, your fingers must be able to flicker as fast as tongues of fire. I had to beg her for ages, drive her batshit crazy, before she agreed to let me go with her. Men are simply not allowed to be helldivers.

  A new river of sweat slips into my eyes, burning them till they’re as red as my rusty hair. I used to reach and try to wipe the sweat away, only to scratch futilely at the facepte of my frysuit. I still want to.

  The tunnel walls around me are bathed a sulfurous yellow by a corona of lights. The reach of the light fades as I look up the thin vertical shaft I’ve carved today. Above, precious helium-3 glimmers like liquid silver, but I’m looking at the shadows, looking for the pitvipers that curl through the darkness seeking the warmth of Dawn's drill. They’ll eat into your suit too, bite through the shell and then try to burrow into the warmest pce they find, usually your belly, so they can y their eggs. I’ve been bitten before, the third time I came. I still dream of it—bck, like a thick tendril of oil. They can get as wide as a thigh and long as three men, but it’s the babies we fear. They don’t know how to ration their poison. Like me, their ancestors came from Earth, then Mars and the deep tunnels changed them.

  Beyond the roar of the drill, I hear the voices of the rest of the miners, all older women. But I cannot see them a half klick above me in the darkness. They drill high above, near the mouth of the tunnel that Dawn carved, descending with hooks and lines to dangle along the sides of the tunnel to get at the small veins of helium-3. They mine with meter-long drills, gobbling up the chaff. The work still requires mad dexterity of foot and hand, but Dawn is the earner in this crew. She is the Helldiver. It takes a certain kind—and she is the youngest anyone can remember.

  I look at her as I think of her. She is beautiful: tall, strong, with a sharp face and easy smile. Her hair and eyes are the color of blood. She started doing this when she was 13 and has been doing this for years, everyone girl does. "Old enough to screw, old enough to crew", or at least that's what my Aunt Carol said.

  Dawn has always been open minded…or at least as open minded as it gets here in Lykos. My family wanted to marry me at 14, but I took the short rations and waited for her to turn the right age and then married her. When she slipped that cord in my finger, she told me that she knew she'd marry me since we were kids. I didn't.

  “Hold. Hold. Hold!” Aunt Carol snaps over the comm channel. “Dawn, hold, girl!” She’s high above with the rest of them, watching Dawn's progress on his head unit.

  Dawn's fingers freeze. “What’s the burn?” she asks, annoyed. We are in a race against other cns to see who can mine more helium-3 and win the Laurel.

  “Gas pocket, that’s what,” Carol snaps. She’s the headTalk for our two-hundred-plus crew. “Hold. Calling a scanCrew to check the particurs before you blow us all to hell.”

  I observe the gas pocket but it looks minute, definitely managable.

  My headpiece is muted and I extend my hand to mute Dawns. "That doesn't look like a gass pocket," I say to her, "I think we can mine it."

  Dawn looks at me, her annoyance deepening, "Lucian, you've barely been on the drill 10 times, and you think you know everything," she ughs derisively, which hurts me more than it should, "I agree with you, honestly, but Carol is the chief. Remember the words of our Golden leader patience and obedience. Patience is the better part of valor. And obedience the better part of humanity. Listen to your elders."

  I roll my eyes at his quote. The elders and most women are slow in hand and mind. Sometimes I feel like they want me to be just the same, especially my Aunt. I am even faster than Dawn. We've tested this and my reflexes and speed are off the charts.

  "Just tell them you are on the tear and that you can drop down and handscan it. Or did I marry a coward?" I grit my teeth. They’ll preach caution. As if caution has ever helped them. We haven’t won a Laurel in ages.

  Dawn eyes narrow, like most women, once her courage gets called into question, they feel the need to prove they have it. She unmutes her comms "I'm right on the tear. This is easy and quick, no hassle. Just let me drop down and scan it."

  “Want to make Lucian a widow?” Bar ughs, voice crackling with static. “Fine by me. He is a pretty little thing. Drill into that pocket and leave him to me. Old and fat I be, but I still know how to ride a drill real good.”

  A chorus of ughter comes from the two hundred drillers above. Dawn's knuckles turn white as she grip the controls.

  “Listen to Aunt Carol, Dawn. Better to back off till we can get a reading,” my sister Kiera adds. She’s three years older. Makes her think she’s a sage, that she knows more. She just knows caution. “There’ll be time.”

  They’re all against me in this. They’re all wrong and slow and don’t understand that the Laurel is only a bold move away. More, they doubt me.

  The Laurel. Twenty-four cns in the underground mining colony of Lykos, one Laurel per quarter. It means more food than you can eat. It means more burners to smoke. Imported quilts from Earth. Amber swill with the Society’s quality markings. It means winning. Gamma cn has had it since anyone can remember. So it’s always been about the Quota for us lesser cns, just enough to scrape by. The Laurel is the carrot the Society dangles, always just far enough beyond our grasp. Just enough so we know how short we really are and how little we can do about it. I just think we never try hard enough. Never take the big risks because of the old women.

  “I say make the scan yourself,” Lora, my cousin and Carol’s daughter, squawks. “Don’t and Gamma is good as Gold—they’ll get the Laurel for, oh, the hundredth time.”

  “Lora, shut up about the Laurel. Hit the gas and we’ll miss all the bloodydamn Laurels to kingdom come, girl,” Carol growls.

  She’s slurring. I can practically smell the drink through the comm. She wants to call a sensor team to cover her own ass. Or she’s scared. The drunk was born pissing herself out of fear. Fear of what? Our overlords, the Golds? Their minions, the Grays? Who knows? Few people. Who cares? Even fewer. Actually, just one woman cared for my aunt, and she died when my aunt pulled her feet.

  My aunt is weak. she is cautious and immoderate in her drink, a pale shadow of my mother. Her blinks are long and hard, as though it pains her to open her eyes each time and see the world again. I don’t trust her. But my father would tell me to listen to her; she would remind me to respect my elders. He would say that my “women are meant to make the decisions and men to support them.”

  I've been counting kilos we've been mining. I've done the math to how much we need to beat Gamma. We are close, but if we wait for the 2 hours for the scan crew, we will lose.

  I wonder if Aunt Carol and Bar know how close we are. Probably. Probably just don’t think anything is ever worth the risk. Probably think divine intervention will squab our chances. Gamma has the Laurel. That’s the way things are and will ever be. We of Lambda just try to scrape by on our foodstuffs and meager comforts. No rising. No falling. Nothing is worth the risk of changing the hierarchy. My mother found that out at the end of a rope.

  Nothing is worth risking death. Against my chest, I feel the wedding band of hair and silk dangling from the cord around my neck and think of Dawn’s ribs.

  I’ll see a few more of the slender things through her skin this month. She’ll go asking the Gamma families for scraps behind my back. I’ll act like I don’t know. But we’ll still be hungry. We both eat too much because we are still growing tall; Dawn lies and says she’s never got much of an appetite. I know she'd do anything to feed me, like selling her organs to the grays…or worse. If things get really bad, I'll have to do what some of the other men around here do and sell my body to the Grays for luxuries.

  I look down over the edge of the drill. It’s a long fall to the bottom of the hole we've dug. Nothing but molten rock and hissing drills. But a moment ter, I’m out of my straps, pressing mute on Dawn's headset, pressing the exit button to open the tch. All of this happens in an instant. Then I jump down the hundred-meter drop toward the drill fingers.

  Dawn shrieks with horror at what I'm doing. "Lucian, don't do it!" She tries to grab me, but I'm faster and I slip out of her vicegrip like an oily pitviper.

  I kick back and forth between the vertical mineshaft’s walls and the drill’s long, vibrating body to slow my fall. I make sure I’m not near a pitviper nest when I throw out an arm to catch myself on a gear just above the drill fingers. The ten drills glow with heat. The air shimmers and distorts. I feel the heat on my face, feel it stabbing my eyes, feel it ache in my belly and balls. Those drills will melt your bones if you’re not careful. And I’m not careful. Just nimble.

  I lower myself hand over hand, going feetfirst between the drill fingers so that I can lower the scanner close enough to the gas pocket to get a reading. The heat is unbearable. This was a mistake. Voices shout at me through the comm. I almost brush one of the drills as I finally lower myself close enough to the gas pocket. The scanner flickers in my hand as it takes its reading. My suit is bubbling and I smell something sweet and sharp, like burned syrup. To a Helldiver, it is the smell of death.